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Just how complex is your noggin?

Your brain synapses are actually more like individual microprocessors than simple on/off switches, and your brain has hundreds of trillions of them.

According to Stephen Smith, a Stanford professor of molecular and cellular physiology, the brain is vastly more intricate than we had ever imagined:

One synapse, by itself, is more like a microprocessor–with both memory-storage and information-processing elements–than a mere on/off switch. In fact, one synapse may contain on the order of 1,000 molecular-scale switches. A single human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth.

Yup, you’ve got the world’s craziest network right on top of yer shoulders.

On Thursday 17 November in Melbourne the School of Thinking celebrated its 32nd birthday with an informal gathering of some local friends of the school.

On a perfect spring evening beside the Yarra River at The Boatbuilders Yard the Chairman of the Council of the School of Thinking, Dr Brian Monahan, welcomed members of the Council and their guests from Melbourne and Sydney.

David Sharry, the creator and owner of The Boatbuilders Yard is also a long standing SOT Council Member. His legendary hospitality kicked off the evening with French champagne followed by the best of Australia’s wines and ales. After a little lateral drinking the thinkers were very pleased when the delicious prawn and chorizo skewers appeared on the scene along with all the many other tasty treats.

Another legendary SOT birthday event. It was tastefully planned to go from 6 to 8 but a determined core group were still pontificating and laughing by the river at 11. La dolce vita!

Timewise, it’s interesting to see that the celebrated Greek thinker Plato lived in ancient Athens around 2500 years ago. Because just around the same time, in ancient China, lived another great thinker … K’ung Fu Tzu.

This ancient Chinese master started one of the world’s most successful schools of thinking and his memes have gone viral and spread around the world and infected even more people than Plato’s.

Master K’ung (or Confucius as he has come to be known in the West) developed positive memes on ethics, behaviour and relationships and devoted his thinking to finding better possibilities in the world. He was a great master of CVS to BVS thinking.

SELF XIO

Confucius had an insatiable thirst for knowledge of antiquity. In his sayings, he rarely used negative prohibitions but preferred to offer positive memes on how to find a BVS if you wish to behave as a chun-tzu or gentleman. What moved him was no lust for power but the will to attain true mastery. If you seek ‘self x10’ then understand your strengths and develop them with practise and mastery. But he was no abstract philosopher. He saw the need to be both a man of thinking and a man of action.

“I hear and I forget. I see and I believe. I do and I understand”.
– Confucius

His nature strikes us as smiling, open and natural. He was a man of the world and of the street who was driven to find ways to help improve the human condition. He founded a school for future statesmen. He edited the classics. And, most significant of all he is credited with beginning China’s great explosion of thinking in all its breadth and potentiality.

As a teacher Confucius was always encouraging his students to learn. He also believed in the importance of daily training and practise.

The Master said:

Is it not pleasant to learn continually and then to put it into practice?

Regardless of how the world treated him, Confucius could still maintain a positive attitude and go on learning and teaching.

Like Confucius SOT also uses Practise, Repetition and Rehearsal (PRR) to teach thinking using tools like brain software cvs2bvs.

XIO thinking

We also develop and use advanced tools like the TRIIII matrix below in some of our workshop sessions with clients.

TRIIII: The Three Levels

Once you get started with the TRIIII there are three levels of XIO thinking: 1 to 10, 10 to 100, 100 to 1000.

For the first time, all of the top 10 systems achieved petaflop/s performance. The U.S. is tops in petaflop/s with five systems performing at that level; Japan and China have two each, and France has one.

Bumped to second place after capturing No. 1 on the previous list is the Tianhe-1A supercomputer the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China, with a performance at 2.6 petaflop/s. Also moving down a notch was Jaguar, a Cray supercomputer at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory, at No. 3 with 1.75 petaflop/s.